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Saturday, September 17, 2016

The four pillars of distinctive customer journeys

New research reveals that focus, simplicity, “digital
first,” and perceptions matter most.

In recent years, customer experience (CX) has emerged as a
major differentiator for large companies, including financial-services
providers. In a McKinsey survey of senior executives, 90 percent of respondents
confirmed that CX is one of the CEO’s top three priorities.

It’s a priority because the stakes are so high. For
financial institutions, for example, rising customer expectations are pressing
organizations to come up with more functional improvements even as alternatives
to traditional financial services are emerging. In this dynamic environment,
financial institutions face a stiff challenge to differentiate their offerings
while reducing cost and complexity for customers—and to do it at a profit.

Overcoming these challenges is critical not just to meet
rising customer expectations and to compete with new digital attackers but also
to generate significant business impact. Our research indicates that for every
10-percentage-point uptick in customer satisfaction, a company can increase
revenues 2 percent to 3 percent.

At a time when the customer-satisfaction scores of
top-quartile institutions can exceed those of bottom-quartile players by as
much as 30 to 40 percentage points, the financial payoff from best-in-class CX
can be significant indeed. These gains come from a variety of sources, including
additional product purchases generated by cross-selling and upselling, such as
when a borrower increases the value of a loan.

To understand what constitutes distinctive CX in financial
services, we performed benchmarking research on five key customer journeys—the
series of interactions a customer has with a brand to complete a task—in
banking and insurance. The survey findings in this article relate specifically
to retail customer onboarding but apply generally to the other journeys we
studied.

Reaching the top quartile of CX performers is no easy task.
Cost, design, and value are emerging as key differentiators for customers, yet
companies often lack guiding principles to shape those efforts. By analyzing
and ranking correlations between customer satisfaction and operational factors
(such as the reasons a customer chooses one company over others, cycle times,
features offered, and the use of digital channels) in our survey, four pillars
of great customer-experience performance stood out:

1. Focus on the few
factors that move the needle for customers

We asked customers to assess different characteristics of
the end-to-end experience, including the first interaction with the
institution, the ease of identifying the right products, and the knowledge and
professionalism of staff. We found that only a small number of characteristics
(typically three to five out of 15) had a material impact and accounted for the
bulk of overall satisfaction (Exhibit 1).

For example, when analyzing the characteristics of the
customer onboarding journey, we found that transparency of price and fees, ease
of communication with the bank, and the ability to track the status of the
onboarding process accounted for 42 percent of overall satisfaction. The next
three highest-ranking characteristics—assessment of broader customer needs;
products and services received immediately after account opening, such as debit
cards and mobile and online banking access; and ease of identifying the needed
product—account for an additional 34 percent. Conversely, characteristics such
as the courtesy of staff, the timeliness of callbacks, and the clarity of
documentation had limited impact on satisfaction. This finding strongly
suggests that banks should concentrate mainly on those things that make the
most difference to customer satisfaction.

2. Ease and
simplicity: The payoff trade-off

Today’s harried customer values convenience. Cutting down
the time it takes to complete an individual journey, such as applying for an
account, by making it easier and simpler has a deep effect on customer
satisfaction.

For example, in France, customer satisfaction drops by up to
30 percentage points when the time to open an account exceeds 45 minutes. That
45-minute point marks the “satisfaction cliff.” But what’s really important to
note is that there is a diminishing payoff in reducing the time it takes a
customer to complete a journey. In France, again, the impact on customer
satisfaction when taking between 15 and 45 minutes to open an account is
relatively minor (the “satisfaction plateau”). Cut that process to below 15
minutes and satisfaction increases by up to ten percentage points. Companies
need to work out the trade-off, then, between the investment in improving the
ease and simplicity of a process and the resulting improvement in customer
satisfaction and new value created.

As more processes are digitized, journey times will be cut
back. But low cycle times alone don’t equate to superior CX. Rather, our
research indicates that customers respond most positively to the ease of a
transaction or process.

3. Master the
digital-first journey, but don’t stop there

We analyzed different types of customer journeys: those that
are completely online, those that start online and finish in a branch, those
that start in a branch and finish online, and those that take place fully in a
branch. We found that digital-first journeys led to higher
customer-satisfaction scores (Exhibit 2) and generated 10 to 20 percentage
points more satisfaction than traditional journeys.

For all the advantages of digital-first journeys, those
journeys that are the most digitized across all the interactions lead to the
greatest customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, many financial services do not
provide fully digital services even when they exist, such as digital
identification and verification. This finding indicates that financial-services
providers can still significantly improve CX by digitizing complete journeys.

4. Brands and
perceptions matter

It may not be surprising that companies whose advertising
inspires their customers with the power and appeal of their brand or generates
word of mouth deliver 30 to 40 percentage points more satisfaction than their
peers. But how advertising or word of mouth affects perceptions is crucial. Two
banks in the US, for example, performed nearly identically across a set of
customer journeys. However, customers viewed one bank as delivering a much
better overall experience than its rival, because the higher-ranked
institution’s advertising promoted its user-friendliness.

That perception had an important effect on identifying
promotions that were effective for attracting new customers but, on average,
had a nearly neutral impact on satisfaction. The average, however, is
misleading. Promotions are slightly negative for traditional banks but positive
for purely online players. In the same vein, physical proximity to a
financial-services provider tends to have, on average, little discernible
influence on customer satisfaction. Again, though, the value to customers of
physical proximity can vary widely from institution to institution and from
country to country, pointing to a need for financial institutions to understand
their customers at a more granular level.

Despite the impact of word of mouth in shaping perceptions,
our survey revealed that few customers recommend a financial-services provider
on the strength of their existing relationship with it. An existing
relationship alone does not turn a customer into an advocate. Institutions that
do more to please their existing customers and help them tell their story to
their peers might be able to mobilize a new group of influential advocates for
their products and services.

It pays to customize

While the four hallmarks for outstanding customer
experiences tend to be universal, experience designers should focus on a range
of customer preferences based on country, product, and age group. For example,
we observed that the ease of navigating through the account-opening process had
a larger impact on satisfaction in Italy than in France. Conversely, the
assessment of broader customer needs is more important in France than Italy.

When looking across products, we also found detailed
differences, such as the satisfaction factors for current accounts and
mortgages. When working with current accounts, customers derive the greatest
satisfaction from transparency on prices and fees; when they’re applying for a
mortgage, by contrast, they most value the ease of filling in the application
form.

Finally, there are also differences among customer groups.
The ease of communicating with the bank is more important to customers 55 years
and older than to 18-to-24-year-olds. Conversely, the ability to identify the
right products is more important to 18-to-24-year-olds than to those 55 and
older. This suggests that processes and value offerings need to be modular with
their emphasis varying with what matters most to each customer segment.

Knowing what to do is the right place to start. But a
company’s success in building out great customer journeys requires agile
capabilities that excel at rapid iteration and testing and learning. Reacting
to live feedback from real customers is often the difference between a good and
a great customer experience. (Joao Dias, Oana
Ionutiu, Xavier Lhuer, and Jasper van Ouwerkerk)

About the author(s)

Joao Dias is a partner in the Cologne office, Oana Ionutiu
is a specialist in the Bucharest office, Xavier Lhuer is an associate partner
in the London office, and Jasper van Ouwerkerk is a senior partner in the
Amsterdam office.